


Metastasize

by nanrea



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Defying Fate, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-26
Updated: 2016-07-26
Packaged: 2018-07-26 19:58:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,347
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7588045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nanrea/pseuds/nanrea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Redglare faces the consequences of fighting an opponent with mind control powers, but they are not the consequences she was expecting.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Metastasize

**Author's Note:**

  * For [confiscatedretina](https://archiveofourown.org/users/confiscatedretina/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Carcinogens](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3523301) by [confiscatedretina](https://archiveofourown.org/users/confiscatedretina/pseuds/confiscatedretina). 



It’s hard to pinpoint at what point everything went wrong.

The noose slips tight around your protein chute as you struggle against the grasping palm fronds of the jury, while across the Pit of Judgment Mindfang sneers at you.

It is not, you think, hard to pinpoint exactly what it was that went wrong. Mindfang had her name for a reason. No, you knew this was a risk from the onset, that she might seize control of a weak willed and vengeance thirsty crowd and turn them against you. You were against the publicity of a trial from the beginning, when you received this assignment and successfully brought her in.

You think of the sneering giant Highblood. _A dAmN fInE jOkE tHiS wIlL bE_ , indeed. He knew. There is no doubt in your mind he knew this would be the outcome.

You kick out against the grasping fronds as they raise you up. You wait for the drop.

 

You land hard against your back on a smokey surface. Gasping, you clutch against your chitinous windhole where the noose is gone but still burns, still you cannot breathe. You feel your back arch up in panic as your mouth gapes open, desperate for air in the sudden vacuum.

When smoke filled oxygen swirls around your body and down your windhole you feel a most wretched surge of relief, panting desperately _what, what,_ rolling to your side, to your knees, trying to get your bearings in the strange foggy haze you find yourself in, the haze flashing in pulsing colors that serve only to disorient you further. It takes you a moment to notice her.

The woman before you is tall, with swirling horns and holding wands surrounded in a nimbus of chaotic colors. Her gander bulbs are blank and white save for the colors reflecting off of them, and though she has no pupils you still shiver despite yourself as you feel her gaze on you.

She is a figure out of Alternia’s darkest legends and nightmares. The Demoness. The Handmaid.

Oh well fuck.

You attempt a leap to your feet, and she barks a harsh laugh, brittle. You feel the ache in it. The loneliness. And somehow the fear slips away, replaced by pity. This myth, this scourge of history. You get an inkling of what may have caused her to rip you from the flow of time into this smoky crystal of liminal space. You can feel it, the thread of destiny that connects you together, much like the threads you had felt and ignored, stretched between you and Mindfang, and the Highblood as well. All of you are hard used by the guiding hands of fate, and her worst of all.

“Not dead,” she says, shaking you out of your musing. You turn to where her strange gaze flickers for a moment, and see the mob through the smoky haze, and Mindfang beyond, one armed and facing down His Honorable Tyranny with only her cutlass. From the noose so lately around your neck dangles some strange doppelganger, the likeness uncanny. Who is that?

“Does not matter. Will be remembered as you,” she answers, her voice scratched and dry, like she has not spoken in centuries. Perhaps she hasn’t.

The smoke swirls and stirs, strange ghosts and scenes flashing and dissipating, along with the view of your erstwhile doom. You glance back her, studying her face while she gazes into the distance, perhaps to see what those ghosts have to say. She is pale and thin, and you are filled with the sense that she has been stretched thin and unfairly worn by whatever it is that has given her this strange power. You feel again the stirrings of pity, and of wanting to pull her out of whatever strange morass she is sunk in.

“Why?” you ask abruptly. The word scrapes painfully past your bruised throat.

She turns that unfathomable blank gaze back to you, a crease forming between her eyebrows as if she herself is not entirely sure, and you fight the urge to smooth it with your claws. “I like you,” she says.

Unbidden, a snort of amusement forces its way out of you. You feel, in a vastly different time, in a vastly different world, perhaps you could have liked her too. Even in this world, you feel you may like her, too much for having just met her, but at this juncture you have no urge to fight it.

“In my way,” she continues.

You wonder at this. She does not seem the type to like anything, and again you feel your pump biscuit surge with an inexplicable wave of pity as red as the algae tides of fulbright season. Still though, you must ask; “So what now?”

That aweful bright gaze settles on you, and the grasp digits holding her flashing wands tighten. Her eyebrows twitch, and you cannot help but wonder if this is the most emotion she’s felt in millennia, and a rush of affection floods your thinkpan at the idea that she could be stirred from her apathy by you. You feel odd. Unworthy, perhaps. Alarmed, maybe, by this connection that you feel to her, as if in this place you have scraped a different reality and can only comprehend some small part of it, the part that makes you feel as if you need to shatter the facade of the Handmaid to reach the person underneath, that you might know that person’s name, that you could rescue HER instead of her rescuing you, that-

A guttering growl cuts through the loop your thoughts have settled in, and your glance nuggets settle on her lips. You have the sudden certainty that whatever happens next, your time with the Handmaid is short, and will never come again, and whether you live or die, you will regret it if you do not take this risk.

You step forward, cupping her cheek with one hand, the juncture between thin shoulder and graceful neck with the other, and pull her close, gently guiding her as if she could shatter. You lean in, your breaths comingling, and caress her cold maroon painted lips with your own, a brush to get the feel of her before joining again for another kiss, this time full, tasting her. She tastes of ash and dust and you feel her lips move against yours as they part in a startled laugh.

Then her arms come up around your shoulders and she leans in hard, mouth slanting and lips parting. You risk another taste of her, her mouth suddenly warm and alive in a way it had not been when you first touched, like honey and strawberries, her body too suddenly surging with a living warmth that had not been there before, and you feel the thrill of it, a surge of emotions suddenly pouring off of her into you that felt both dusty and bright, like too many colors flashing and blinding, lust and pity and regret and longing and wanting and something you don’t have the word for, that in this world and at this time does not exist, you feel it, you feel suddenly like you are holding light and time itself.

And when your lips leave hers she is gone.

A shudder of pain sweeps you as you feel every cut and bruise you had received at the hands of the mob, but you are alone. You are in a strange and new place, a place you have never seen or even conceived of before. The sky above stretches clear and blue, the grass around you stands green and rustles in the breeze. You spin, suddenly laughing, the elation not yet leaving you though you feel her loss. In the distance you see strange buildings, cylindrical against the brilliant but not blinding sky. Above them, floating as if suspended by the hands of an ineffable entity, are words in a foreign alphabet, though you can still read them.

You feel, suddenly, as if you have been freed, and rewarded beyond measure for your pain.

**Author's Note:**

> I really liked the original for this remix! I thought the concept was intriguing, and I wanted to see Latula's side of things, and where she might have ended up! I actually liked the canon ending to homestuck, and thought it would be a good place for her, being beyond the reach of Lord English and Doc Scratch :D Happy-ish endings are nice once in a while.
> 
> Also troll words for things are HARD. I tried to use as much termonology as I could because I think it's fun, but I couldn't find the words for some things orz


End file.
